Nancy Venable Raine After Silence

Annotation

"After Silence is a book that dignifies the human spirit. It should be read by everyone." --New York Times Book Review "There are few published first-person accounts of the experience of being sexually pillaged and its aftermath. After Silence is one of the first and, I would wager, it is always going to be one of the best." --New York Times Book Review "Neither self-pitying nor shrill, Raine has achieved an impressive balance between a starkly candid memoir of a personal trauma and an ingenious literary discussion of an all-too-often unspeakable crime." --Publishers Weekly "As Raine takes us through her personal journey of recovery, she also explores the shifting cultural consciousness toward rape. . . . It's this willingness to interrogate the world around her, combined with an emotional honesty that portrays intimate drama without resorting to sensationalism, that makes After Silence one of the most important memoirs of the 1990s." --Ron Hogan, Amazon.com "Terrifying though it is, I couldn't put this book down. . . . What attracted and held me is Raine's engagement with the material, her engagement with her life. And she is wise; she knows a lot about life. If you have been raped, you must read this. Even if your life is going well, thisbook will hold you rapt, for it tells us what we most want to hear: if we work at it, life may give us a second chance." --Jesse Kornbluth, AOL.com "A brave, an important, and a necessary book." --Anna Quindlen